


Sins of the Father

by Paycheckgurl



Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Family, Family Angst, Family Secrets, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Kinga-centric, Major Character Undeath, Present Tense, Secrets, what happened to larry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 17:25:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13529061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paycheckgurl/pseuds/Paycheckgurl
Summary: Kinga discovers some new information about Jonah that ties him to the very origins of Mystery Science Theater.





	Sins of the Father

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Speccy for the Beta!

It wasn’t planned.

Kinga really had just thrown the show trap to the wind and caught one. And, when that one didn’t work, unceremoniously threw him in an alternate dimension and caught another. Jonah really had no idea who he was. Just how much he really was fated to be here. It’s almost funny how the universe feeds on little coincidences like that.

Dr. Larry Erhardt was a footnote. True, he’d helped shape the experiment at its inception. He was first. But that didn’t make him _marketable_. Not when most fans saw the show’s first season as a skippable curiosity from before Joel and the bots had really perfected the art of filling dead air. Interesting because it was first and certainly still entertaining, but not quite what would soon follow. Not when TV’s Frank had far eclipsed him as the benchmark in second bananas. Not when the survey she’d thrown out to the Internet indicated he wasn’t even in the top ten things they wanted to see return to the show.

But the connection was there.

And wouldn’t it all make for the perfect bombshell ratings reveal?

She thinks about it. Telling him. Live on the Kinga Chrome feed. Broadcast nationally via Netflix. But it isn’t the right time. Not at the beginning of the season when fans are still digesting his miraculous return from almost dying. She’s still a bit preoccupied with trying not to kill Max on the spot. She’s her father’s daughter, of course, and won’t actually _leave_ him dead. But then again, she’s her grandmother’s granddaughter and the Forrester women can be a lot more brutal when they wanted to be. She has several permanently dead grandfathers that can attest to it.

Jonah doesn’t look like him. At least he doesn’t anymore. But Kinga has done her homework. Seen the awkward school pictures dating back to when he was a precocious little kindergartener in Honolulu, and in those awkward pre-college school pictures is where the resemblance really shines. Especially that junior year photo. The unruly hair. The wire glasses. The toothy grin. The round face. She has to put down the photo the first time she stares at it. It’s eerie.

* * *

 

Yet when she first suspected, she thought she had to be wrong. That the man was dead. Slapped on a milk carton in vain. Probably rotting in pieces under the floorboards of Deep 13. He was there one day. And the next her dad explained to her that “Uncle Larry” was gone on vacation. A vacation he probably won’t be coming back from. Ever. Fucked up as it is, it’s one of her earliest memories. She was 4.

They gutted Deep 13 and the basements of Castle Forrester when she decided to move production to the moon. They scoured everything related to the show, as well of all of their dads’ projects. All of her grandmother’s projects from that era as well. The few invention exchanges and props that survived the satellite's crash she hunted down on eBay.  Their very thorough search found no body under the floorboards. The only trace of Dr. Erhardt is on old tapes they need to clean up for the special edition releases and a dusty file cabinet in the corner.

* * *

 

Again, she thinks about telling him. But it’s still not the right time. Not midseason when there’ll be no big impact. Technically her wedding announcement had been midseason, but she doesn’t dwell on that too long. Instead she keeps sitting on it. She stares at the monitor mulling everything over.

“Whaaat are you doing?” asks Tom, enunciating the _what_. He sees that she’s watching.

“Don’t speak until I tell you to,” she snaps.

He doesn’t have eyes to roll, but somehow that’s the expression Kinga assigns to his demeanor.

“Ever hear the expression ‘you catch more flies with honey’?” he sasses her.

“Ever hear that I have EMPs?”

“Alright, alright. Sheesh.”

He goes to hover away.

“Wait,” she says. “Does Jonah ever remind of you of anyone?”

He hovers back to the center of Cambot’s view, and shrugs his still newly poseable arms. “Most of you humans are the same to me. Also I only really know like eight of you.”

Without meaning to, his estimate had cut Larry right out. Mike, Joel and Jonah. Max’s dad and her dad. Her grandmother. Max and herself. No room for Larry. He had to know more humans, of course, even if the qualifier there didn’t already imply he did. The Satellite constantly had visitors, and that was before anyone he’d known during his stint back on Earth was factored in. But still. It sticks with her. Even the robots edit him out of the narrative.

It’s probably not deliberate. Servo, annoying little pompous thing that he is, is still the “baby” of the family, so to speak. He knew Larry the least amount of time by virtue of being the robot around the least amount of time. And they both know he’s lying through his nonexistent teeth about the humans being the same to him.

“Okay, but out of the humans you know, who does he remind of you of?” she asks.

“Uh...I don’t really know. He’s not very much like Mike or Joel. You really dropped the ball on finding the perfect hybrid of them, you know. Instead he’s all...Jonah-y. Cheery, awkward, scruffy, gullible…”

Now it’s her turn to roll her eyes. “Oh please. You didn’t actually want some creepy Joel and Mike hybrid anyways. You’d be constantly comparing him to them even more then you already do, and upset when he still didn’t live up them because he’s not the original. You and Crow just held onto that so you’d have another reason to rag on him. I could have stuck you with a total ass you know; you’ve seen the _Time Travelers_ tapes, right?”

Servo goes silent for a second. She knows that he, Crow, and Gypsum don’t usually regard her as a real threat. They don’t address her as “ma’am” and they don’t periodically thank her for not killing them. Even Jonah, the most replaceable of them all (even with the information she’s sitting on), sees her as (mostly) harmless. Despite how hard she works at it. What she sees in Tom is an actual moment of fear. And despite how hard she’s tried in the past to get to this point, she’s not sure she likes it.

“You wouldn’t...would you?” he asks quietly.

She feels she has to renege. Alleviate the fear. It’s counterproductive and she knows it.

“Nah. It’d be bad for branding,” she admits. “Can’t market you as robot friends if you’re constantly getting abused by an unlikable main character, can I?”

Truthfully it’s why the first one she caught couldn’t make the cut. But also she knows that deep down there’s not a single member of her family that would be able to stomach it. Original point of the experiment aside, the damn robots mean something to them. She spent countless nights as a kid crying over the fact that her grandmother didn’t even pretend she liked her even slightly as much as she liked “Art”.

“Just don’t tell anyone,” she adds. “I _was_ serious about the EMPs.” Well, half serious. Enough she could temporarily take them offline, but not enough she’d actually hurt them. That’s probably why they don’t respect her-- they’re all painfully aware she needs them. More so than in any other incarnation of the experiment.

“Noted,” he says. “While we’re admitting things we’re not telling anyone, I do like Jonah a lot, by the way. We all do. He’s a mess of a human even by human standards, but he cares about us a lot. If we absolutely had to play the comparison game I’d say he’s like Joel in that they both have that creative Gizmocratic inventor thing going for them-- but don’t tell him I said that. It’d go right to his head and there’s still only one Joel. It’s just a few things in common, not really enough for him to be accurately described as ‘like him’ anyway.”

She laughs sardonically. “No shit. Aren’t you supposed to be the smart one? Because you really just pointed out the obvious.”

“Well… you were the one that asked.”

He hovers off. Cambot keeps recording and she mulls over ordering the bot to delete that footage. What would Larry think if Jonah didn’t take after him, but the man he tortured? Considering the fact the evidence points to him being alive, what _does_ he think? She’s not buying yet another one of her own lies again. He’s not just a footnote.

* * *

She has Bonehead #1 grab the hair sample during the show open. It’s the only way to know for sure.

Jonah had been taken aback and flinched, but he didn’t mess up by drawing attention to it or yelping in pain over the band or her singing. He just looked confused-- like he was supposed at that point anyway. He doesn’t even question it until after the show is through.

“What was that anyway?” he asks her.

“What was what?” she plays dumb back to him.

“Why did Terry pull my hair earlier?”

“I don’t police what the boneheads are into.”

He snorts, and she can see that dopey grin of his come out. It wasn’t quite the same grin that she’d seen in that high school picture. The one Larry always wore. If Jonah used to smile like that, he’d evolved past it a bit. Developing his own friendly take on the expression independent of its (possible) origins.

“Okay but seriously, you aren’t trying to clone to me, right?”

Synthia was doing… that Synthia thing in the background. Kinga wrinkles her nose instinctively.

“I’ve made my position on clones pretty clear.”

(Bonehead hybrids and interdimensional copies were still on the table, but no one had asked about that).

“Fair enough,” he says.

She questions it again then. Jonah is too… good. Too nice, even when he had no reason to be. When a crappy movie literally meant to torture him for the amusement of others did one single thing less horribly than normal he’d call attention to it. When he bantered with her he was disconcertingly friendly, beyond the point of just trying to placate what they both knew was probably an empty threat. It couldn’t be. She was what a legacy of evil looked like. Not Jonah.

And then the test came back. He was.

* * *

Laurence “Larry” Heston barely existed. He was listed as a father on Jonah’s birth certificate and on a marriage license to one Emily Heston, which she digs up from a public records search. The birth certificate had come first, from just before the show in ‘87. The marriage license three and a half  years later, from just after it. He didn’t have his own birth certificate listed anywhere.

Larry Heston didn’t exist on the internet outside of that. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Instagram. No LinkedIn. Not on the remnants of an old MySpace on the Wayback machine or an oblique reference in the archives of the local newspapers. Not even a voter ID or DMV record.

Finally, she does find a blurry picture deep within Jonah’s personal file. A second grade family tree includes his face, and not much else. His mother’s side is much more complete. It includes his mother’s sisters and brothers and Jonah’s little cousins. The father's side has a picture of an old man that’s supposed to be Grandpa (that might be a stock photo from a department store shoot) and Grandma (which may also be a stock photo from a department store shoot). Perhaps unsurprisingly, both “Grandpa” and “Grandma” were listed as dead before Jonah was born. And then there it is. The grainy picture labeled “Dad”. But she’d seen that grainy picture before. On a milk carton. It haunts her more knowing he’s alive in Hawaii than it did thinking he was dead.

* * *

 

She needs to get into that filing cabinet again. The first time she’d really only needed files with the experiment prints on them. The filing was less efficient than the button pressing process, and much less efficient than the button press and KingaChrome storage combo she’d cooked up. There was an early test episode or two missing still. But that wasn’t what she was after. Security tapes were a file above. And… well, this was way too easy. _The Diary of Laurence Erhardt._

* * *

 

They’re two thirds of the way through season 12. It’s a little shorter than season 11, but Netflix is almost entirely footing the bill now, so she’ll take fewer episodes per season for guaranteed funding and more seasons overall in the future. It’s still not finale time, and still not the opportune time to tell the world what she knows.

She’s down in Moon 13 musing over this and Max is knitting. He’s concentrating very hard, sticking his tongue out a bit as he works. It looks like purple socks with the Moon 13 logo on them. They’re way too small to be for Max or any one Bonehead. They can only be for her. If she were on camera she’d make a point to show her strength, rip the stupid things out of his hands and toss them on the concrete. Off camera... there’s no point. She lets Max make his stupid socks in peace, and sighs to herself.

He’s very attuned to her. He has been since the day he was grown and artificially aged to be her playmate. He notices something’s off easily. He always does.

“What’s wrong my Queenly-ness?” he asked her. She huffs. Save the titles for the cameras, Max.

Annoyance aside, he’s a better companion than Synthia ever was, if only because no one had ever tried to make him a direct replacement. Sure, he was like his father, genetically _was_ his father, and was basically filling his old role on the show. But no one ever directly said to her “Frank’s gone so this is the new Frank.” He’d already been there all along as a part of her life, even if the viewers peering in hadn’t been aware of it. Maybe that’s her real problem with the “TV’s Son of TV’s Frank” moniker; he’s not just TV’s Frank’s son. He’s Max.

To be fair to Synthia (urgh), she wasn’t very much like Grandma Pearl, and was her own person as well. The expectation she should really truly be her instead of say, Kinga’s weird genetically grown Great-Aunt, was where that resentment came from. And the fact they were both playing a game where they pretended the other wasn’t aware the clone degeneration was mostly an exaggerated act.

“I’m going to ask you something, but you’re going to have to promise to play along,” she says.

“That is kind of what I’m best at,” he tells her.

“Would our Dads be proud of us?”

“Of course they would!” He doesn’t even hesitate. “We’re realizing their life dream!”

Well, their own slightly tweaked version of it. And it was a life dream that got them both killed.

“It’s like pulling teeth to get her to admit it, but even Pearl’s proud of you...mostly. What’s this about anyway?”

“Look... nothing! It’s nothing! Just forget it!” she snaps. And winces. Even off camera she doesn’t apologize, but Max knows her well enough to know she’s remorseful in the moment.

She tries again.

“What if what they wanted for us wasn’t what we think they wanted though… what if they didn’t want us to become them?”

“You know genetically I’m _literally_ my Dad, right?”

He’s hitting right on what’s she’s trying to get at without meaning to.

“You’re you though. You can do anything you want. You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.”

“I wouldn’t be a very good Second Banana if I wasn’t at your side,” he tells her. “If I didn’t _want_ to be at your side.”

She side eyes him. That crush is dangerous territory and while it’s mostly run its course, he’s not going to let his jealousy win again, she’s hyper aware of it. How it can mess up everything they are. Everything they’ve worked for. And everything they’ve been before. She carefully ignores it.

“Would you still be at my side if I suddenly decided I was going to save the world for purely altruistic reasons and leave evil behind me?”

He laughs. He laughs until there are tears in his eyes.  “Oh my god, that’s rich! Good one! The best laugh I’ve heard in months...oh my god. That’s hilarious!”

This… isn’t what she wanted out of this conversation.

Her entire identity, for better or for worse, was built around living up to her family’s legacy. And even the people who knew her best thought her doing anything outside of that legacy was positively hilarious. Her old insecurities, _thanks Grandma Pearl_ , rear their head again. The thought of her doing anything right at all is probably hilarious to them too.

* * *

He was young when he wrote the diary. He was young when he was working on the experiment. He was getting his doctorate on an accelerated track, and Gizmonics couldn’t wait to snatch him up. But he was seduced by the dark side of the quirky freedom Gizmonics offered.

Emily is first mentioned in 1985.

_Emily was my server at the Big G again. She asked about my thesis and she sounded so into it! She’s so pretty!_

 

_Emily said yes to go to the movies! We’re going to see a classic Planet of the Apes marathon! Oh gosh I need to fix my hair!_

 

_I saw her boobs._

Kinga flips past the next two pages. They’re very relevant, but Larry isn’t exactly a skilled romance writer. She can go without knowing what Emily looked like naked through the lens of a horny graduate student who wasn’t much older than most horny undergraduates were.

_Dr. Forrester is taking a special interest in me. He’s showing me all kind of ways to use Science that aren’t really “above board” but oh they’re so fun and there’s so much the mad sciences have to offer! Dr. Forrester is so great!_

 

_I’m evil! Evil! Evil! EVVVVVIIIL!_

_…_

_And I like it!_

 His relationship with Emily stays mostly the same over the next several pages. There’s references to holding hands and roller rink dates. It’s cute. In a cloying way.

_Dr. Forrester really hates Joel Robinson. I think he’s just jealous because a janitor’s inventions are always better than his. But hating Joel with him will get me on that secret project._

 

_I did it! I am Doctor Laurence Erhardt. Dr. Forrester came to the ceremony and was so proud of me! Emily kissed me so long. I was worried she wouldn’t be able to make it because she’s had the flu..._

The entry immediately after that is less celebratory. The ink is smudged and the paper is water damaged in a way that can only really be described as “tear soaked”.

_Emily left me. She said that “due to circumstances outside of her control” she’s moving back to Hawaii to be with her family to finish undergrad there._

_And then she said “No. I can’t do this. Larry I love you, but unless you’re willing to stop this the evil mad science we can’t be together. Something changed. I’m sorry. I love you. I do. If you change your mind...you know my mom’s address. I’ll be staying there.”_

_And she just left me. Dr. Forrester comforted me. He said that spending months away from civilization is probably just what I need. Before I rule civilization with him._

 

 _The Mystery Science Theater 3000 project (named for the project’s tentpole theater) has begun. Joel Robinson has been successfully shot into space and subjected to isolation and the worst films we can find. I give him a month before he breaks and can use the celluloid that does it to enslave humanity and TAKE OVER THE WORLD_!!!

 

_Joel had to go break things and make robots out of them. Now he’s not going crazy from isolation and he’s all proud because he thinks he’s a parent now. He knows that’s a camera with googly eyes on it, right?_

 

There’s no entry on the next page. Just a letter taped to it. Attached to the letter is a series of pictures.

_Larry,_

_There’s someone I want you to meet. This is Jonah. My son. And yours. Our son. I’ll admit, I like the sound of that._

_You’re going to be in a lot of trouble Larry. I know what you were planning to do to Joel Robinson. What you already did. I found out I was pregnant right after your graduation. I couldn’t bring myself to give up our child, but I can’t have him raised around all that evil. I hope you see now why I had to leave. To give Jonah a chance to be innocent and forge his own path away from that kind of darkness. But I’m giving you a chance too. As well as an out. If you can promise me, prove to me, that you will put all this evil behind you...I want you to be a part of Jonah’s life._

_I lied on Jonah’s birth certificate for you. I listed you as his father, but changed your last name. His full legal name is Jonah Jay Heston, after Charlton Heston. I thought it was a nice reference to our first date. I realize I’m asking you put aside evil, and then bend some rules, but this is for the greater good. The greater good for our child. What I’m saying is if you, for our son, can walk away from Doctor Forrester you can start over. We can start over. As Emily, Laurence, and Jonah Heston. If not, you have a right to at least know your son exists. He has your mouth._

_With so much love,_

_Emily_

The next page only had one sentence.

_I’ve made a huge mistake._

There were two more pages left with writing on them.

_Dr. Forrester is a father. He has a little redheaded girl that orders me around and demands people read from her fairytale book and punches a very beat up teddy bear when she throws a tantrum. He dotes on her. I didn’t know she existed until the experiment started. She wants to be just like him. And he loves her. He want to give her the world. Literally. We’re trying to take it over and she’ll inherit it one day. Part of me doesn’t think it’d be that bad if Jonah were like me. He can play with Kinga who’ll be queen of everything before she knows it. He can have power and I bet he got my smarts. But I know Emily won’t go for that._

 

_I was watching Joel today between experiments. He was talking to Crow, the gold robot with the net. He was explaining to him about roller coasters because he saw one in a book and wanted to know how the people didn’t fall out in the loops. He gave a physics lecture and Crow kept interrupting him with off color remarks and making fun of his creator. “Riffing.” That’s what they call their talking over the movie thing. That’s what he was doing to Joel’s lecture. Joel doesn’t get mad, and instead almost encourages it. As much as he encourages the questions. He’s gentle with him. He always treats them like real people instead of a hunk of junk.  After a while Crow left and Joel noticed I was watching._

_He addressed me as Sir like he always does and asked what I wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted._

_“The robots are pretty different from you huh? They’re kind of mean sometimes,” I observed._

_“They’re not mean. Only to films that really deserve it. Crow can be a bit of a wisecracker sometimes, but he wouldn’t try to hurt someone’s feelings on purpose.”_

_“They’re not a lot like you though.”_

_“If they were like me they wouldn’t be very good company. Or individuals. I want them to be themselves.”_

_“What if being themselves was being evil?”_

_“I don’t think anyone is born evil. They learn it. If I teach them about good people and what going too far looks like, they’ll learn empathy. I guess I want to foster their interests while giving context to why things are bad. Come on, you weren’t born evil, were you, sir?”_

_I wasn’t. I wasn’t born evil. And neither was Doctor Forrester’s little girl._

 

_Dr Forrester,_

_By now you’ve found this diary and probably tried to kill me. Hopefully I made it out to Hawaii anyways and I’m now with Emily and my son. I hope you as a parent can understand. I want what’s best for him. And what’s best for him, I think, is to leave everything behind._

_Thank you!_

_Larry_

* * *

The last experiment of the season comes. And she doesn’t say anything on air.

She leaves the diary for him to find in the bunks instead, with a note. All off screen.

_Jonah,_

_It’s your right to know what’s in this diary, but also your right to decide if you ever want it mentioned on screen. If not...well. Whatever._

_PS: I found this after I kidnapped you. Your butt still just ended up here because you’re a self sacrificing idiot._

_XoXo_

_Kinga_

The real Forrester legacy is never seeing anything through to fruition anyway.  


**Author's Note:**

> So this whole fic came about because Jonah Ray has a habit of making fun of his old school pictures on Instagram with #ThrowUpThursday, and its been pointed out that he used to look a lot like J Elvis during his time as Larry. Combined with the fact Larry just sort of canonically disappears and no one in-universe knows for sure what happened to him (aside from probably Dr. F), this was too fun of an idea to leave alone.
> 
> Also in order to make this work I'm fudging the timeline a bit. But I think it still mostly works (I invoke Repeat Yourself Its Just a Show I Should Really Just Relax)


End file.
